This paper presents design, implementation, and evaluation of a miniature rectenna for energy harvesting applications. The rectenna produces DC power from a distant microwave energy transmitter. The generated DC power is then utilized to operate a head-mountable deep brain stimulation device. The rectenna consists of a miniature three-layer planar inverted-F antenna and a Schottky-diode-based bridge rectifier. The antenna has a volume of π × 6 × 1.584 mm 3 , a resonance frequency of 915 MHz with a simulated bandwidth of 18 MHz (907-925 MHz), and a measured bandwidth of 18 MHz (910-928 MHz) at the return loss of −10 dB. A dielectric substrate of FR-4 of ε r = 4.5 and δ = 0.02 is used for simulation and fabrication of the antenna and the rectifier due to its low cost. An L-section impedance matching circuit is employed between the antenna and the rectifier to reduce the mismatch loss. The impedance matching circuit operates as a low-pass filter eliminating higher order harmonics. A deep brain stimulation device is successfully operated by the rectenna at a distance of 20 cm away from a microwave energy transmitter of power 26.77 dBm. The motivation of this paper includes creation of a deep brain stimulation device that operates indefinitely without a battery. From the application standpoint, the developed energy harvesting rectenna facilitates long-term deep brain stimulation of laboratory animals for preclinical research investigating neurological disorders. INDEX TERMSEnergy harvesting, rectenna, deep brain stimulation, miniature device.

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In this paper, we investigate a secure dual-hop radio frequency-free space optical (RF-FSO) mixed variable gain relaying framework in the presence of a single eavesdropper. The RF and FSO links are modeled with hyper Gamma (HG) and Gamma-Gamma (ΓΓ) fading channels, respectively. We assume that the eavesdropper utilizes another HG fading channel to wiretap the transmitted confidential data from the RF link. Our key concern is to defend this information against passive eavesdropping. We carry out the secrecy measurements by deriving closed-form mathematical expressions of average secrecy capacity (ASC), secure outage probability (SOP), and strictly positive secrecy capacity (SPSC), all in terms of Meijer's G function. Capitalizing on the derived expressions, we analyze the impacts of atmospheric turbulence and pointing errors on the secrecy capacity and outage performance of the proposed scenario. For gaining more insights, we also analyze the asymptotic outage behaviour for high signal-to-noise ratio. Two detection techniques i.e. heterodyne (HD) and the intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/DD) are taken into consideration and our results demonstrate that HD technique notably outperforms the IM/DD scheme. The supremacy and novelty of the model is demonstrated via utilizing generic properties of the HG fading channel. Finally, we provide a justification of the derived expressions via Monte-Carlo simulations. INDEX TERMS Gamma-Gamma fading, eavesdropper, Hyper-Gamma fading, physical layer security, pointing error, variable gain relay.

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